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GNOME's Zeitgeist Engine Has Its First Release

Phoronix: GNOME's Zeitgeist Engine Has Its First Release

One of the GNOME projects that's in development that should premiere around the time of GNOME 3.0 is Zeitgeist, which is the system for tracking user activity and events and then logging it, so that later on the user can use the Zeitgeist tool to browse or find events and files on the computer. This project is described by the Zeitgeist developers as, "You worked on a file, but you cannot remember where you saved it? You visited a web page about basketball three days ago, but you cannot find the URL in your browser's history? No problem, this is where Zeitgeist enters the scene...

Another epic fail IMO. I know where my files are and don't need any trackers indexing and grinding my disk down. I don't know why indexing is such a popular feature of many OSes. It's sad how much effort beagle and tracker received.

I hope this is not being integrated in to gnome apps ? I kinda think this stuff is already, gedit for example, will open a file and jump to the last location in the file. Seriously, its a simple text file, all that does is waste cpu and disk. I find this really annoying, which is why i ditched gedit.

Another epic fail IMO. I know where my files are and don't need any trackers indexing and grinding my disk down. I don't know why indexing is such a popular feature of many OSes. It's sad how much effort beagle and tracker received.

The article doesn't mention Zeitgiest's long term goals, which may be why you believe it to be another indexing service. It shouldn't be thought of as Yet Another Desktop Indexer, but more like a desktop revision control system. Like bzr or git that doesn't require commits(or branches, or pushing and pulling of remote repo's or anything else that at normal desktop user wouldn't use).

I don't like to judge software before having tested it, but I'm pretty sure I would disable this one fast, if it came enabled by default on a fresh installation of, say, a future Ubuntu release. I've seriously given content indexers a try, but they mostly just waste system resources and add little value. The Locate program is very simple, but still often does the job. Besides, I rarely forget where I store things or what I work on.

As described, Zeitgeist looks like a replay or revision control system. It has abso-fucking-lutely nothing to do with the windows registry.

There are many legitimate uses for such a system and it opens some pretty interesting possibilities if it's included by default. What possibilities? Think user assistance (your father loses his photos, you use Zeitgeist to retrace his steps and restore them), application testing (I did xyz and your application crashed, here is a Zeitgeist replay) and more.

Of course, most people wouldn't understand innovation even if you spellt it, but that's ok. I, for one, like seeing features that aren't copied right out of commercial OSs.